… for the lack of activity over here in the last week or so: I’ve been too busy over the last week or so (i) taking a Gaggia coffee machine repeatedly to bits with a colleague, (ii) interviewing university applicants and (iii) proof-reading. And being comprehensively routed on the streets of London on Monday, of course [see below]. All there’s time to do now is to record my opinion that this man is unelectable.

The headlines from yesterday’s Daily Mail about the rugby parade on Monday were excellent: “HEROES“, said the front page, advertising a “Glorious 8-Page Souvenir Picture Pullout”. The news article on page two boasted that there were “Nearly a million on the streets – and not one arrest”. And, best of all, on the opinion page, we had this: “On the day the politically-correct haters of our history and identity were routed… PATRIOTIC AND PROUD OF IT”, introducing an article by, god help us, Neil Lyndon.Too busy to post much this week, I’m afraid. Being routed so comprehensively takes up a lot of time.

Here in Oxford the only people who seem to buy Oxford University sweatshirts are the armies of tourists who throng the city centre. (Students who play for university sports teams often advertise that fact on the clothes they wear, and College scarves are, of course, another way of making an — in this case slightly more discreet, in a twisted, British sort of way — institutional identification.)

In America, things are completely different, and students there are unreasonably fond of ugly sweatshirts with the campus name emblazoned across the front. The ground floor of the Harvard Coop sold little else, and its monthly bills had odd slogans on them like, “The Coop — For All Your Insignia Needs”, which always seemed to me a little preposterous.

Still, Americans like their insignia, and Harvard kids like theirs, and so I was very pleased to learn today that after holding out for five years, Harvard has agreed to join the Workers’ Rights Consortium, the only properly independent monitoring organisation which keeps tabs on the factory and labour conditions under which university clothing, etc., is produced.